How to get the difference between two arrays of objects in JavaScript

Question

I have two result sets like this:

// Result 1
[
    { value: \"0\", display: \"Jamsheer\" },
    { value: \"1\", display: \"Muhammed\" },
    { value: \"2\",         


        

Answer 1

JavaScript has Maps, that provide O(1) insertion and lookup time. Therefore this can be solved in O(n) (and not O(n²) as all the other answers do). For that, it is necessary to generate a unique primitive (string / number) key for each object. One could JSON.stringify, but that's quite error prone as the order of elements could influence equality:

 JSON.stringify({ a: 1, b: 2 }) !== JSON.stringify({ b: 2, a: 1 })

Therefore, I'd take a delimiter that does not appear in any of the values and compose a string manually:

const toHash = value => value.value + "@" + value.display;

Then a Map gets created. When an element exists already in the Map, it gets removed, otherwise it gets added. Therefore only the elements that are included odd times (meaning only once) remain. This will only work if the elements are unique in each array:

const entries = new Map();

for(const el of [...firstArray, ...secondArray]) {
  const key = toHash(el);
  if(entries.has(key)) {
    entries.delete(key);
  } else {
    entries.set(key, el);
  }
}

const result = [...entries.values()];

const firstArray = [
    { value: "0", display: "Jamsheer" },
    { value: "1", display: "Muhammed" },
    { value: "2", display: "Ravi" },
    { value: "3", display: "Ajmal" },
    { value: "4", display: "Ryan" }
]

const secondArray = [
    { value: "0", display: "Jamsheer" },
    { value: "1", display: "Muhammed" },
    { value: "2", display: "Ravi" },
    { value: "3", display: "Ajmal" },
];

const toHash = value => value.value + "@" + value.display;

const entries = new Map();

for(const el of [...firstArray, ...secondArray]) {
  const key = toHash(el);
  if(entries.has(key)) {
    entries.delete(key);
  } else {
    entries.set(key, el);
  }
}
  
const result = [...entries.values()];

console.log(result);